Jim Haynes Web site

Jim Haynes traveled the decades and the world; he did it all, saw it all, met them all. And he still thinks life is a miracle. We asked him his secret.

photograph ©Philippe Besnard 2006
For the past 30 years, Jim Haynes has done in Paris what he is best at:connecting people.

In 1963, Haynes unleashed his creative energy to found the Traverse Theater, a temple for the experimental (now Edinburgh's most respected theater). Three years later, he moved to London and, with no money but many friends and countless contacts, started the London Traverse Theater Company and edited the International Times, the first such underground paper in the United Kingdom. (The Pink Floyd and Soft Machine animated the launch party.) He also established the Arts Laboratory, in which "We [were] everything we claim[ed] to be," Haynes wrote in his online autobiography. Many people lived there, while musicians, poets, and dramatists, including David Bowie, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, ran the perpetual show. About managing the Arts Lab, Haynes wrote: "My policy [was] to try to never say the word 'no' and in three years of running the Lab I almost never [did] so."

He certainly never said no to women. For sex to Haynes is the best way for people to meet and share. To promote sexual liberation, he published SUCK from Amsterdam, the "first European sexpaper," and created The Wet Dream Festival. "My main definition of obscenity is any form of violence," Haynes explains. "But any two people making love together, or any graphic or written image describing this, I find not obscene at all, just sexual information that's desperately needed." Spreading the word, Haynes also published Hello, I Love You! (1974), a compilation of essays in which he and his friends describe their sexual lives and experiences. His 1984 autobiography exclaims on its lurid pink cover the explicit title: Thanks for Coming!
By chance, Haynes was in the Latin Quarter in Paris in May 1968, but he didn't stay when the students clashed with the police. "I am not really interested in confrontation," he explains. "In London I used to say, 'don't hit the policeman over the head. Just take him to dinner, him and his wife.'" Around that time, he became a teacher at the newly created University of Paris VIII. The founders pushed the right button: they described their project as "experimental," "wild," "free." He couldn't resist. He moved to Paris and never left. For thirty years, until he retired in 1999, he taught "Sexual Politics" and "Media Studies" and loved it. Haynes has never "worked" in his life: he has always "fullered," a verb he invented in a pamphlet, Workers of the World, Unite and STOP WORKING (2002). To fuller means to enjoy what one does and focus on pleasure or knowledge rather than a salary.

His atelier, hidden in a calm alley in the 14th arrondissement, became his base and a roof for his many friends and their friends. Haynes never gave up traveling, "the purest form of education." Besides his yearly pilgrimages to the Cannes Film Festival, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the Edinburgh Festival, he roams the world, especially Eastern Europe. In the early 1970s, he declared his atelier the "World Government Embassy" and distributed thousands of World Passports and other "official" documents until a French court condemned him in 1974 for "disturbing the public." In the early 1990s, he published the People to People series, guidebooks to ten countries listing people who wanted to meet foreigners. Today, Haynes concentrates on his Sunday dinners, an institution he established nearly thirty years ago. Every Sunday, about 50 people, many Americans, invite themselves to dine in his atelier. Perched on a stool, he orchestrates the buffet dinner, doing what he is best at: connecting people.

visit also The Paris Times on the Web!